Writing and The Politics of Race: Being Written

Abstract

Writing consciousness, being intelligence, is identified with Russia and America; non-writing consciousness, being spirit, is identified with Germany; writing consciousness as animality; poetry provides access to Being, traditional philosophy causes forgottenness of Being; two kinds of people: metaphysical man (man as subject) and pre-metaphysical man (man as Dasein); spirit’s fall and degeneration into intelligence (extension, number, the Reckoning Order of Representation); modern consciousness, vulgarity, the masses; spirit as true and proper, intelligence as semblance; originary spirituality vs. modern culture; spirit is holistic whereas intelligence is fragmented; world and worldlessness; modern consciousness as improper, unhuman, devoid of Being, as falsified spirit; originary spirit as resolute attunement to Being; Trakl’s poetry: Heidegger’s ontological reading of ‘apartness’ as the aletheic space; the call of Being as a summons to ownmost selfhood; the distinction between spirited and spiritual; rejection of the metaphysical–Christian understanding of spirit; pre-metaphysical spiritedness as flame, as being outside, as Dasein’s ek-static ek-sistence, as enflaming consciousness; writing consciousness as metaphysical spirituality, as framing, as reification; the receptiveness of the flaming and encountering gaze; withdrawal to apartness as the shedding of falsified spirit; schism: the decomposed kind (metaphysical man, modern man, man as subject), vs. the proper, unborn kind that withdraws to apartness; withdrawal to apartness as returning to the originary Occident; apartness’ gathering force is the unifying force of Ereignis; unifying difference; post-metaphysical man’s return to the human essence; the German people is the sprit-restoring race; philosophy as fundamental ontology; our Dasein; the event of history; transformation of the call of Being into the call of history; German nationalization of spirit, the question of Being, even humanness itself; Germany’s historical mission: saving Europe–the Occident, humanity–from spirit’s degeneration and the looming threat from the outside; Russia and America as technological pincers, Marxism on one side, positivism on the other; Heidegger’s opposition to communism and capitalism; demonization and de-humanizing of Russia and America; the human and the animal; Russia and America as a metaphor for Germany’s Other; Heidegger’s guilt; Heidegger’s Nazism; Plato and Heidegger on the pharmakos; Russia and America as Heidegger’s pharmakoi; metaphysics and Heidegger’s Nazism; the dream of purity and Heidegger’s logocentric racism.